Cancer is killing millions of people worldwide, because existing drugs do not enable effective prevention or treatment. Current checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapies that re-activate existing immune responses can provide clinical benefit for a fraction of cancer patients. Current cancer vaccines that induce new immune responses are poorly immunogenic and fail to benefit most patients.
Recent analyses of 63,220 unique tumors revealed that cancer vaccines need to be generated specifically for each patient because extensive inter-individual tumor genomic heterogeneity (Hartmaier et al. Genome Medicine 2017 9:16). Using state of art technologies it is currently not feasible to scale HLA-specific cancer vaccines to large populations.